Houston Sierra Club attended the 5th annual Houston Hackathon on May 19 and 20.  Hackathon is a weekend-long, friendly competition among coders who develop websites or apps to solve a range of problems.  This year’s winning ideas ranged from where to find groceries during extreme weather events, like Hurricane Harvey, to making money mowing vacant city lots to aggregating political campaign activity of Texas politicians.  

 

Houston Sierra Club’s Chair, Elizabeth Spike, formed a team of six individuals with backgrounds in front and back end software development to create a website called, The Last Straw.  The Last Straw is a minimal viable product (think proof of concept) to help customers find local restaurants consuming less single use plastic, saving our ocean resources from persistent and toxic plastic pollution.  The website is a work in progress, but it is live. To visit The Last Straw go to https://rchillard.github.io/supper-app/index.html. 

 

If you’d like to get involved in this project, email Elizabeth at iamespike@gmail.com.  There is still much work to do and Houston Sierra Club thanks all the volunteers who collected data.